ABSTRACT
This paper tries to accommodate some of the apparently contradictory currents stirred by these two crossdressing passages, to provide a single, coherent version of the erotic possibilities contained under a kind of rubric of transvestism in the early modern period. For, in the current text-critical literature, we seem to be being told both that these are texts of sexual fantasy, disturbing and transgressive, and that these texts record some ‘actual’ possibility for individualized, subversive affirmation of sexuality.4 I do not myself believe we shall ever know how many cross-dressed youths and young women were to be found on the streets of London around 1600, but I do believe that it is possible to show that the distinctive ways in which the textual imputation of their existence function in the various narratives which have come down to us can be resolved into a consistent positioning of dominant to dependent member of the early modern cornmunity.5 I have, of course, spoken about cross-dressing before, in Still Harping on Daughters (Jardine 1983). But that was in the context of an argument specifically focused on the irrelevance of any detectable emotional intensity associated with the cross-dressed boy-player to any reconstruction, on the basis of the drama of the age of Shakespeare, of a peculiarly female early modern intensity of feeling. Here my argument will be differently focused: upon the way in which, in the early modern period, erotic attention-an attention bound up with sexual availability and historically specific forms of economic dependency-is focused upon boys and upon women in the same way. So that, crucially, sexuality signifies as absence of difference as it is inscribed upon the bodies of those equivalently ‘mastered’ within the early modern household, and who are placed homologously in relation to that household’s domestic economy. Inside the household, I shall argue, dependent youths and dependent women are expected to ‘submit’, under the order of familial authority, to those above them. And the strong ideological hold of the patriarchal household ensures that, in the space outside the household-in the newer market economy whose values govern the street and the public placethe tropes which produce structural dependency as vulnerability and availability are readily mobilized to police the circulation of young people.
